Paul Cézanne

The radical stylistic innovations of Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) laid the groundwork for Modernism in art. Born to a well-off family, Cézanne dedicated himself to art in his 20s following failed attempts at law and banking. Initially aligned with the innovative Impressionist artists rejected by the Salon of the Académie, Cézanne developed his distinctive, mature style between the late 1870s and early 1890s. In his landscapes, he reduced nature into flattened geometries and rendered perspective through color alone. He continued this exploration in his still-life paintings and portraits, building form with color using subtly gradated “constructive brushstrokes.” After decades of negative critical reception, Cézanne’s reputation began to grow with his first solo exhibition in 1895. His work is among the most influential in the history of modern painting and was a source of inspiration for Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and Giacometti, whose works are on view in this exhibition.

Cézanne’s portraits were among Heinz Berggruen’s early acquisitions. Though Berggruen sold much of this work to focus his collection on the twentieth century, certain outstanding examples remain. Unlike his peers, Cézanne did not accept portrait commissions. A somewhat shy personality, he primarily painted people he knew. Cézanne’s subjects, such as his wife (depicted in paintings nearby), demonstrated patience and affection in agreeing to sit for the notoriously slow painter.

Pablo Picasso

Throughout his long life, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) generated nearly a century of innovations in modern art. The son of an academic painter, he showed an early aptitude for naturalism, which he furthered through formal art education in Barcelona and Madrid. Around the time he settled in Paris in 1904, Picasso turned his realism toward depicting everyday people, including beggars, friends, and traveling entertainers during his Blue and Rose Periods, named for the predominant hue of each phase. By 1906, the revolutionary Fauvist works of Henri Matisse had inspired Picasso to experiment.  The two nearly lifelong friends and rivals became leaders of the avant-garde in modern art. He began to draw upon a wider range of aesthetic objects, including African masks. Beginning in 1907, Picasso and Georges Braque co-developed Cubism, which introduced a radical new approach to space in painting. In the 1920s, Picasso experimented with Neoclassicism and Surrealism, and in subsequent decades, he would oscillate between all his previous styles at will. Picasso’s monumental Guernica (1937), named after a town obliterated by bombs during the Spanish Civil War, evidenced his increasing political engagement later in life. He would maintain his prolific creative production until his death in 1973.

Picasso is one of the most widely exhibited and discussed twentieth-century artists, and his works make up a plurality of those in Heinz Berggruen’s collection. After World War II, Berggruen had the opportunity to meet the artist, and the two collaborated on artist’s books, exhibitions, production, and prints. Even after years of working together, Picasso often misspelled his friend’s and print dealer’s name as “Bergrruen.”

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Picasso’s three studies of female heads nearby build to his first climactic rupture from academic art: the monumental Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), now hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Picasso’s radical distortions of the human form mark a departure from his earlier naturalistic work and his studies of traditional European paintings. In 1906, the artist saw early Iberian stone sculptures at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, inspiring him to simplify and schematize figures and shapes. The stocky frames of the figures in Head of a Woman (1906-1907) and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon evoke roughly cut stone. In spring 1907, Picasso visited the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. Shortly thereafter, he painted Female Nude (Study for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon) (1907) and reworked the faces of the two women on the right-hand side of the final painting. The contrast between Female Nude’s colorful narrow head and grey shoulders, the sharp chin and nose, and vacant eyes point toward the influence of the African masks at the Trocadéro. The fragmented forms, flat and hatched planes, and dark outlines mark the beginning of one of the most influential innovations in modern art: Cubism.

Georges Braque

Along with his contemporary and frequent collaborator Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque (1882–1963) was one of the leading figures of Cubism. The term Cubism in fact comes from a critic’s description of Braque’s works, which abstracted and simplified architectural structures into cubic forms. Before his earliest experiments in Cubism, Braque had a strong interest in Fauvism. Influenced by the art of Cézanne, Braque began to explore more geometric expressions of natural landscapes, challenging the painterly tradition of linear perspective. In 1907, Braque saw Picasso’s revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and the two artists began working closely together to explore this new visual language that combined multiple perspectives into a single geometric composition. Whereas Picasso often depicted human figures, portraiture occupied a much smaller place in Braque’s works. More often, Braque painted still lifes with a singularly refined sense of composition. Musical scores and instruments were a recurring theme in his work, perhaps due to the artist’s talent for music. An apprentice housepainter before he became an artist, Braque was familiar with various materials and surface qualities. He would often incorporate sand and other objects into his pigments, adding texture to the canvas. In 1912, he affixed imitation woodgrain wallpaper to a canvas, inventing the technique of collage in modern art.

In August 1914, Braque was drafted into the army, and his fruitful collaboration with Picasso came to an end. This also marked a conclusion to the main phase of Cubism. Gravely injured in the war, Braque only returned to art again the following year. Heinz Berggruen was very interested in this primary phase of Cubism, and he collected two such still lifes by Braque, including Still Life with Pipe (Le Quotidien du Midi)(1914), on view here.

Cubism

Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s paintings here exemplify the radical re-imagining of spatial reality that came to be known as Cubism. Beginning around 1907 with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Braque and Picasso integrated different perspectives on a painted subject into one image, disrupting the long European tradition of linear perspective. These compositions of fragmented planes and abstracted figures offer multi-dimensional views of space. Meanwhile, the frontal surfaces and color planes emphasize the flatness of the canvas. In the works on view here, Braque and Picasso apply Cubist spatial logic to deconstruct portraits and still lifes of everyday objects, including musical instruments, a glass, a newspaper, and a bottle arranged on a table.

Cubism is one of the most influential movements in modern art. It dramatically changed the practices of artists who encountered it and inspired later evolutions of abstraction, such as those of Matisse and Giacometti in this exhibition. Picasso’s Still Life with Glass and Deck of Cards (Homage to Max Jacob), made in 1914 toward the end of his Cubist period, incorporates elements of collage. This radical incorporation of found objects was characteristic of this mode of work, called Synthetic Cubism. That same year, Braque was drafted for military service in World War I, abruptly ending his and Picasso’s generative artistic exchange.

World War I

Between 1914 and 1918, Europe was consumed by one of the deadliest and most brutal wars in history. Artists were not exempt from the front lines. Georges Braque was drafted in 1914 and sustained a head wound soon after, halting his creative collaboration with Picasso on Cubism. Braque did not paint for more than a year afterwards. Henri Matisse volunteered for service but was rejected as he was already 45 years old. Paul Klee was drafted in 1917, but did not cease his creative efforts. He drew and painted at his desk in the Gersthofen flight school, creating a series of watercolor poem pictures inspired by Chinese poetry that merged imagery and text. Klee’s Awakening (1920) celebrates his survival and calls on humanity to reflect and reconstitute itself from ruin.

Following the carnage of the war, a movement to “return to order” gained traction among artists in France. Many artists temporarily pulled back from their most radical experiments in abstraction and began working again in a more realistic mode, albeit in quite different forms than their pre-modern antecedents. Pablo Picasso’s Italian Woman with a Jar (1919) exemplifies the artist’s exploration of Neoclassicism that continued alongside his investigations of Cubism into the 1920s.

Paul Klee

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was born into a family of musicians in Switzerland, and before he became a visual artist, he was an adept violinist. Although he ultimately chose to study painting, Klee would continue to incorporate musical elements into his works, seen for example in Abstract Color Harmony in Squares with Vermilion Accents (1924), in which the titular abstract squares embody the rhythms of a musical composition.

In 1914, on a trip to North Africa, Klee experienced a revelation related to color. On this journey, research into color became the new core of Klee’s art, displacing a previous focus on draftsmanship. As he noted in his diary, “Color possesses me. […] Color and I are one. I am a painter.” A highly prolific artist, Klee made more than 9,000 works in his lifetime. His paintings are difficult to categorize by style, oscillating between figurative depictions and abstract color compositions. Sometimes they seem almost childlike in their simplicity, while elsewhere they convey profound introspection. Apart from his artworks, Klee was also a dedicated art educator for much of his life, first at the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar and later at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 1933, the Nazis seized power in Germany, and Klee was forced to leave his post, fleeing from Germany to Switzerland.

Heinz Berggruen had a similar experience of displacement, so it may not be surprising that Klee was the first artist that he ever collected. Berggruen even chose the title of one of Klee’s works, Highway and Byways (1929), to be the title of his own memoir. In 1984, Berggruen and his family donated 90 of Klee’s masterworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of the most important donations in the museum’s history. Berggruen’s interest in Klee continued to the very end of his life, and to this day, more than 70 of Klee’s works form a key component of the collection of Museum Berggruen.

Bauhaus

In 1919, the architect Walter Gropius established the Staatliches Bauhaus in the city of Weimar in Germany. Gropius was dedicated to the integration of fine arts, craft arts, and architecture, believing that by unifying the roles of artist, sculptor, and architect, he might give rise to a new program of modern design with function at its heart. From the very beginning, the Bauhaus curriculum gave equal weight to art and craft. Among the professors at the college were many of the early twentieth century’s preeminent artists, including Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. The two artists’ research into form and color laid the practical groundwork for the Bauhaus’ conceptual innovations. Klee joined the academy in 1921, and the first course he taught was “Practical Composition.” He was also responsible for workshops on bookbinding.

The works by Klee in Heinz Berggruen’s collection primarily come from the period of the artist’s employment at the Bauhaus. Due to his scholarly responsibilities, Klee began to reconsider the methodologies underpinning his art, and works from this time reflect his reconsiderations of line and geometric forms. Klee also researched techniques of flatness and depth, striving to break through geometric principles of depiction to arrive at a more intuitive mode. For example, the floating, unstable lines of Little Castle Yellow/Red/Brown (1922) and Architecture of the Plain (1923), on view in this exhibition, deconstruct the three dimensional structures of the original architecture.

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) began painting in 1889. In his early academic work, he already showed interest in the human figure. At the turn of the century, he took up sculpture and founded the Fauvist movement, which used contrasting swaths of color to depict various subjects. As Matisse gained recognition, he met Picasso, who became his lifelong friendly rival. The two artists competed as leaders of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Reacting to Cubism, Matisse developed a monumental decorative style that investigated interiors as studies of color and pattern. Beginning in 1917, Matisse spent increasing lengths of time in Nice, often painting costumed, reclining figures against ornamental backgrounds.

In the 1930s, Matisse began using cut paper to plan and adjust the composition of larger commissioned works. From 1946 on, Matisse devoted his final decade of practice to using cut paper to create finished works in their own right. Matisse’s refined, concise forms cut from planes of flat color confirmed his status as one of the most influential and innovative artists of the twentieth century. Museum Berggruen’s collection focuses on these late career papier découpé works, which exemplify the height of Matisse’s abilities and culminate in Blue Nude Skipping (1952). This work, located toward the end of the exhibition, reveals how Matisse used cut paper to create a sense of rhythm and dynamism on the picture plane.

Picasso’s Models 

The women depicted in Picasso’s paintings profoundly impacted the artist’s creativity and the development of his practice. The relationship between the artist and his models was the subject of numerous works, including The Sculptor and His Statue (1933), hanging in this show. In this work, the statue resembles Picasso’s then-lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, over whom his marriage to Olga Khokhlova was disintegrating. Picasso dramatized that conflict in The Bathers (1934), where a monstrous Khokhlova drowns Walter in the lower right corner. In 1936, he began an affair with Surrealist painter and photographer Dora Maar, portrayed with green fingernails in a portrait in this exhibition. Maar’s political sensitivity contributed to Picasso’s thinking for some of his greatest paintings, including the masterpiece Guernica (1937), made during the Spanish Civil War. Throughout his long career, Picasso drew inspiration and stylistic renewal from the individual characters of these women whom he intimately knew.

Heinz Berggruen acquired Dora Maar with Green Fingernails (1936) and The Bathers from Maar’s estate. Berggruen likely empathized with the reclusive Maar, who, like many of Picasso’s models, was devastated by his infidelity and their separation. In the fractured, tearful face of Woman in a Multicolored Hat (1939), painted upon Picasso and Walter’s parting, the artist also expressed a more collective agony and anxiety leading up to World War II.

Death and World War II

The atrocities of World War II transformed the works and lives of the artists in this exhibition, a reality summarized by Picasso when he said, “The war is [undoubtedly] in the pictures I’ve painted.” Picasso used the green-grey of the German army’s uniform to paint Large Reclining Nude (1942). The fractured figure is confined to a prison-like room, capturing the claustrophobia of Picasso and Dora Maar during the occupation of Paris. German invaders looted hundreds of thousands of works of art, including Picasso’s Yellow Sweater (1939). The French Resistance narrowly stopped the train carrying it to Nazi Germany and returned the painting to its owner.

The chaos and destruction forced many artists to rebuild from the ground up. Paul Klee’s productivity dropped precipitously from 1933 onward, when the Nazis took power in Germany and forced him out of his job as professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and when an incurable disease started to burden him. As the war broke out, Matisse also suffered from a life-threatening illness and endured the Gestapo’s arrest of his wife and daughter. After coming face-to-face with death, Klee and Matisse launched into periods of unprecedented creation that the latter called a “second life.” Klee shirked the constraints of the Bauhaus in favor of elementary forms in Child’s Play (1939), hanging nearby. The mature sculptural style of Alberto Giacometti, on view in the next room, also emerged from the ashes of the war.

Matisse’s Paper Cut-outs 

In the final decade of his life, Matisse dedicated himself almost entirely to his paper cut-outs. The artist noted that through the abstraction of cutting shapes from gouache-painted paper, he finally achieved “a form filtered to its essentials.” This period of artistic renewal was one of Matisse’s most prolific. “The paper cut-outs allow me to draw in color,” said Matisse, fulfilling his lifelong quest to unite form and color.   

Matisse recognized that his cut-outs were ahead of their time, predicting, “It will be much later that people will realize how much what I am doing today was in harmony with the future.” Heinz Berggruen could see that future. In 1952, he visited Matisse and was immediately drawn to the 82-year-old artist’s cut-outs. Matisse joked that his own son, a major gallerist, had “straight out refused to show” these revolutionary works. In 1953, Berggruen’s gallery in Paris staged the first public exhibition of the cut-outs with great success. In the final years of his life, Matisse used cut-outs to design his exhibition posters. The two posters hanging on the facing wall advertise the 1953 Berggruen show and a London sculpture exhibition that same year, one of the artist’s final major efforts.

Alberto Giacometti

Born into a family of artists, Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) studied academic painting and settled in Paris in 1922, where he began studying sculpture intermittently. In 1927, he and his brother moved into a studio in Paris that became their lifelong workspace. There, he began making Cubist sculptures that simplified male and female nudes into symbolic forms. In the 1930s, a psychological use of empty space emerged in Giacometti’s Surrealist compositions. In the following decade, he befriended Picasso and existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Giacometti’s mature style, exemplified in the works on view here, emerged with the end of World War II. In the aftermath of the war, viewers across the globe found in his sculptures a metaphor for the human condition, one that includes horror and displacement, but also freedom of will. Following a crisis of self-doubt in 1956, Giacometti’s late works embodied an even greater intensity, and he was honored with major museum retrospectives during his lifetime.

Heinz Berggruen deeply admired Giacometti’s work. Along with his acquisitions, Berggruen’s memoirs demonstrate how closely bound he felt with the artist. In 2005, he described his encounters with the restive sculptor: “I called on him from time to time, towards evening. My visits never seemed to bother him. But he also did not want to know why I had come – he simply ignored me. I took a look around the studio, made a few comments to which there was never a reaction, and then I left again. ‘A bientôt’ [See you soon], I would say, and without a glance he would answer, his dexterous hands interlocked with a sculpture, ‘A bientôt.’”

No Finished Picture

At age 89, Pablo Picasso believed there was “no such thing as a ‘finished’ picture.” The artist imbued his love of “things that lead on” in Matador and Nude (1970), which emanates as much vivacity and eroticism as his early paintings. For Picasso, “finishing off” held connotations of death and conclusion that were antithetical to his artistic quest for immediacy. As Picasso approached the end of his long life, he followed fellow octogenarian Henri Matisse in producing works with a velocity and energy that seemed to cheat death. The uncompromising productivity and innovations of these artists up to their last moments secured their transition into artistic immortality.

Toward the end of his life, Heinz Berggruen developed an appreciation for the late-career works of Picasso and Paul Klee at a time when these pieces were still undervalued by critics. These works by artists reflecting on death held a mirror to the interior musings of the mature collector as he considered his own legacy. Concluding with Berggruen’s forward-thinking acquisition of Matador and Nude, the exhibition also explores that ongoing legacy, offering vignettes of figures who continue to shape art history.